| Popis: |
There have recently been a number of important advances in the philosophy of causation, which impact our understanding of both the nature of causation and of causal reasoning. Two stand out in particular: First, a large body of work on the way that normative factors can influence causal judgement casts doubt on the intuitive idea that causation is a purely natural relation, independent of human interests and values. Second, the so-called ‘causal modelling framework’—developed by computer scientists and statisticians as a formalism for discovering causal relations—has turned out to be a powerful and extremely fruitful method for representing causal systems. It has also been incorporated into the philosophy of causation as the basis of James Woodward’s influential interventionist (or manipulability) theory (Woodward 2003). The aim of this paper is to provide an introduction to these recent developments, to show how they are related, and to comment on their relevance to linguistics. |
